I have been running a cheap bsa shotgun scope on my mini- thirty for several years. Rapid fire or whatever it hasnt failed me.

I lost a bushnell once on a mini 25 years ago, but I also lost a simmons varmint scope just a few years ago from shooting a 17hmr rimfire.

So that certianly isn't enough information to confirm a hypothesis that they are hard on scopes. I suggest a call to ruger to ask them if they are aware of this issue.

The mini has been used successfully in the roles it was designed for.

No one wants to hear that their gun is worse or better. Right now you have a lot of people owning ARs and they surely wouldn't want to be told that their gun is inferior to something that on average is less expensive.

I suggest owning all of them like I have at one time or another or all at once.

One thing is for sure is that it took a lot of time before anything was done about bringing optical sights down to a reasonable elevation for a target shooter to use effectively in an ar15.

This was never a problem with the mini 14 ranch rifle. It was the main reasons why I disliked owning an ar15. If you could not double the gun as a short range plinker or groundhog killer at close distances using a scope than what good was it in my opinion.

Also in combat the mini14 shares the same advantage as the m14 when using open sights. about 1 and a half inches more of your head is hidden behind cover when using a rifle where the open sights are just off the barrel.

So basically it took until this century before the AR could catch up to the versatility and affordablity of the mini14.

The only time the platform (mini14, ac556) was a horror story was when it was in the wrong hands such as during the platt-mattox gunfight. its reliablity made it very horrible than and I am sure a lot of people would have hoped Ruger had not built such an effective gun at the time.